Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence

THE ARGUMENT
Chapter I. ESSENCE AND DISINTEREST
1. BEING’S “OTHER”
[3] If transcendence has meaning, it can only signify the fact that the event of
being, the esse, the essence, passes over to what is other than being.
Transcendence is passing over to being’s other. Being and non-being, Being’s
other, illuminate one another, and unfold a speculative dialectic which is a
determination of being. The statement of being’s other, of the otherwise than
being, claims to state a difference over and beyond that which separates being
form nothingness – the very difference of the beyond, the difference of
transcendence.
2. BEING AND INTEREST
[4] The essence works as an invincible persistence in essence, filling up every
interval of nothingness which would interrupt its exercise. Esse is interesse:
essence is interest. Being’s interest takes dramatic form in egoisms which are at
war with one another, each against all… and are thus together. Thus essence is
the extreme synchronism of war.
Essence reverts into its other by the rational peace, by calculation, mediation and
politics which turn the struggle of each against all into exchange and commerce.
The clash of each against all in which each comes to be with all, becomes
reciprocal limitation and determination but the persisting in [5] being, the
interest is maintained by the future interest. Commerce is better than war, for in
peace the Good has already reigned.
The difference that separates essence in war form essence in peace presupposes
that breathlessness of the spirit, in which what is beyond essence is conceived
and expressed; this breathlessness or holding back is the extreme possibility of
the Spirit, bearing a sense of what is beyond the essence.
3. THE SAID AND THE SAYING
The inescapable fate in which being immediately includes the statement of
being’s other is due to the hold of the said over the saying. The original saying
or pre-original saying [6] weaves an intrigue of responsibility.
The pre-original saying moves into a language, in which saying and said are
correlative of one another, and the saying’s subordination to its theme… to the
said, to the linguistic system and to ontology, is the price that manifestation
demands.
Language qua said is ancillary and thus indispensable. Language permits us to
utter the outside of the being, the ex-ception to being as though being’s other
were an event of being. [7] We have been seeking the otherwise than being from
the beginning, and as soon as it is conveyed before us it is betrayed in the said
that dominates the saying which states it. The otherwise than being is stated in
as saying that must also be unsaid in order to extract the otherwise than being
from the said in which it already comes to signify but a being otherwise.
4. SUBJECTIVITY
[8] To conceive the otherwise than being we must try to articulate the break-up
of a fate that reigns in essence in that its fragments and modalities despite their
diversity, belong to one another, i. e., do not escape the same order, do not
escape Order. This effort will look beyond freedom. Freedom, an interruption of
the determinism of war and matter, does not escape the fate in essence and takes
place in time and in the history.
To go where? The essence claims to recover and cover over every ex-ception.
The exception of the “other than being,” beyond not-being, signifies subjectivity
or humanity, the oneself which repels the annexations by essence. The ego is an
incomparable unicity. A unicity withdrawing from essence – such is man.
5. RESPOSIBILITY FOR THE OTHER
[9] The otherwise than being can’t be situated in any eternal order extracted
from time. It is then the temporalization of time, in the way it signifies being and
nothingness, life and death, that signifies a difference with respect to the couple
being and nothingness. The differing of the identical is also its manifestation.
Time is recuperation of all divergencies, through retention, memory and history.
But if time is to show an ambiguity of being and the otherwise than being, its
temporalizarion is to be conceived not as essence, but as saying.
[10] The relationship with… not belonging to the order of presence is included
in… my responsibility for… the freedom of another. The freedom of another
could never begin in my freedom, that is, abide in the same present. The
responsibility of the other is the locus in which is situated the null-site of
subjectivity.
6. ESSENCE AND SIGNIFICATION
[11] In the relationship with the original… the response of the responsible one
does not thematize the diachronical. The Good can’t become present or enter
into a representation. The Good is not presented to freedom; it has chosen me
before I have chosen it. Diachrony is the refusal of conjunction… and in this
sense, infinite. In the responsibility for the Other… this refusal of the present…
ordains me to the other. Despite-me, for-another, is signification par
excellence… ; it is the very fact of finding oneself while losing oneself.
[12] This response answers, before any understanding, for a debt contracted
before my freedom and before any consciousness and any present. What is
positive in responsibility, outside of essence, conveys the infinite. Subjectivity,
prior to or beyond the free and the non-free… is the breaking point where
essence is exceeded by the infinite. [13] In its being subjectivity undoes essence
by substituting itself for another. Qua one-for-another, it is absorbed in
signification, in the saying or the verb form of the infinite. Signification
precedes the essence. It is not a stage of cognition…, not the absurdity of
nonidentity… It is the glory of transcendence. Substitution is signification…
as… interruption of the irreversible identity of the essence. [14] the identity of
the subject comes form the impossibility of escaping responsibility
7. SENSIBILITY
the break up of identity, the changing of being into signification, into
substitution, is the subject’s subjectivity, or it’s subjection to everything, its
susceptibility, its vulnerability, its sensibility. [15] the self, a defecting or defeat
of the ego’s identity… pushed to the limit, is sensibility, sensibility as the
subjectivity of the subject. It is a substitution for another, one in the place of
another, expiation. Responsibility for the other… is a passivity more passive
than all passivity. Substitution, at the limit of being, ends up in saying, in the
giving of signs, giving a sign of this giving of signs, expressing oneself. …
stripping beyond forms… no longer goes beyond being. Responsibility goes
beyond being… possibly elected by the Good in an involuntary election… for
the Good can’t enter into present not be put into a representation… being good it
redeems the violence of its alterity
8. BEING AND BEYOND BEING
[16] The otherwise than being.., understood in a being, differs absolutely form
essence… and is said only in the breathlessness that pronounces the extra-
ordinary word beyond.
The act of consciousness is motivated by the presence of a third party… a
togetherness and contemporaneousness… being understood on the basis of
being’s other… as a responsibility for the other, it is also a responsibility for the
third party
9. SUBJECTIVITY IS NOT A MODALITY OF ESSENCE
[17] The problem of transcendence and of God and the problem of subjectivity
irreducible to essence, irreducible to essential immanence, go together.
[18] Behind every statement of being as being, the saying overflows the very
being it thematizes in stating it to the other. It is being which is understood in
the – first or last – word, but the last saying goes beyond the being thematized or
totalized. [19] The beyond being, showing itself in the said… is already
betrayed. The beyond being does and does not revert to ontology; the statement,
the beyond, the infinite, becomes and does not become a meaning of the being.

THE EXPOSITION
Chapter II. INTENTIONALITY AND SEEING
1. QUESTIONING AND ALLEGIANCE TO THE OTHER
[21] Seeking what show itself, in truth, under the name of being; who looks?
The answer required is in terms of being, whether one understands by it entity or
being of entities, entity or being’s essence. [22] Being would be not only what is
most problematical; it would be what is most intelligible. A questionable
intelligibility. The manifestation of the being, the appearing, is indeed a primary
event, but the very primacy of the primary is in the presence of the present. In
the diachrony… with regard to the progressiveness of manifestation… there is
the interval that separates the same from the other, an interval that is reflected in
manifestation. [25] Subjectivity is structured as the other in the same, but in a
way different from that of consciousness. Consciousness is always correlative
with a theme, a present represented… a being which is a phenomenon. The way
subjectivity is structured as the other in the same differs form that of
consciousness, which is consciousness of being. Subjectivity becoming a
consciousness of being… signifies an allegiance of the same to the other,
imposed before any exhibition of the other, preliminary to all consciousness.
[26] Both being and the vision of the being refer to a subject that has risen
earlier than being and cognition… in an immemorial time which reminiscence
could not recuperate as an a priori.
2. QUESTIONING AND BEING: TIME AND REMINISCENCE
[27] Who is looking? The logos as said, a revelation of being in its amphibology
of being and entities, lets the “who?” gets lost in the “what?” The subject of the
look will be a thinking being… belonging to the subject-object unity. [28] Truth
can consist only in the exposition of being to itself, in self-consciousness. The
upsurge of a subjectivity, a soul, a “who”, remains correlative with being,
simultaneous and one with it. The mutation of the exhibition into knowledge has
to be interpretable as a certain inflexion of this exhibition. The soul would live
only for the disclosure of being which arouses it or provokes it; it would be a
moment of the life of the Spirit, of Being-totality, leaving nothing outside of
itself, the same finding again the same. But the manifestation of the being to
itself would imply a separation in being, for this “showing itself to” indicates a
getting out of phase which is precisely time, that astonishing divergence of the
identical from itself. [29] Truth is rediscovery, recall, reminiscence, reuniting
under the unity of apperception. The totality of being temporally getting out of
phase, alone sufficient for truth…; the transcendence of the totality thematized
in truth is produced as a division of the totality into parts… reflecting the whole.
The whole reflected in a part is an image. Truth then would be produced in the
images of being. Image is both a term of the exposition, a figure that shows
itself, the immediate, the sensible, and a term in which truth is not at its term,
since in it the whole of being does not show itself in itself, but is only reflected
in it. Truth is something promised. [30] The visibility of the same to the same,
which is sometimes called openness. [31] Is the subject completely
comprehensive out of ontology?
3. TIME AND DISCOURCE
a. Sensuous Lived Experience
Things are discovered in their qualities, but the qualities are in lived experience,
which is temporal. The exposition, the phenomenology of being, can not be
separated form time. [32] Husserl: Time, the sensorial impression and
consciousness are put together. Differing within identity, modifying itself
without changing, consciousness glows in an impression inasmuch as it diverges
form itself, to still the expecting itself, or already recuperating itself. Still,
already – are time, time in which nothing is lost. [33] the “living present”… a
rehabilitation of the sensorial given” of empiricist sensualism… [posited] in the
context of intentionality. Through the notion of the living present, the notion of
origin and of creation, a spontaneity in which activity and passivity are
completely one, tend to become intelligible. [34] The temporalization of time –
the openness by which sensation manifests itself, is felt, modifies itself without
altering its identity, doubling itself – is neither an attribute nor a predicate
expressing a causality “sensed” as a sensation.
b. Language
[35] The lived sensation, being and time, is already understood in a verb. In
sensibility the qualities of perceived things turn into time and into
consciousness. But language is also a system of nouns. Denomination designates
or constitutes identities in the verbal or temporal flow of sensation. [36] In the
sensible as lived, identity shows itself, becomes a phenomenon, for in the sense
as lived is heard and “resounds” essence… the time of consciousness is the
resonance and understanding of time. The lived, a “state of consciousness”, a
being, designated by a substantive, is distended, in the time of lived experience,
into life, into essence… across time, the same finds again the same modified.
Such is consciousness. [37] Husserl: the word at once proclaims and establishes
an identification of this with that in the already said.
c. The Said and the Saying
It is through the already said that words, elements of a historically constituted
vocabulary, will come to function as signs and acquire a usage. If man was only
a saying correlative with logos, subjectivity could as well be understood as a
function or as an argument of being. But the signification of saying goes beyond
the said. [38] it is the signifyingness of saying going beyond essence that can
justify the exposedness of being, ontology.
d. The Amphibology of Being and Entities
[39] The connection between the said and being is not simply reducible to
designation. There is no essence or entity behind the said, behind the Logos.
Essence is the very fact that there is a theme, exhibition, doxa or logos, and thus
truth. Essence is not only convened, it is temporalized in a predicative statement.
[40] Language qua said can then be conceived as a system of nouns identifying
entities, and then a system of signs doubling up the beings, designating
substances, events and relations by substantives or other parts of speech derived
form substantives, designating identities. But also language can be conceived as
the verb in a predicative proposition in which the substances break down into
modes of being, modes of temporralization. Here language does not double up
the being of entities, but exposes the silent resonance of the essence.
Art is the pre-eminent exhibition in which the said is reduced to a pure theme, to
absolute exposition… The said is reduced to the Beautiful, which supports
Western ontology. [41] Every work of art is in a sense exotic, without a word,
essence in dissemination. The very individuality of an individual is a way of
being. [42] The said as a verb is essence or temporalization. The logos enters
into the amphibology in which being and entities can be understood and
identified, in which a noun can resound as a verb and a verb of an apophasis can
be nominalized. Things and all substantives come form a narrative and refer to
the logos, to the said. Logos is the ambiguousness of being and entities, the
primordial amphibology. The birthplace of ontology is the said. Ontology is
stated in the amphibology of being and entities, Fundamental ontology itself,
which denounces [43] the confusion between Being and entities, speaks of
Being as an identified entity.
e. The Reduction
The responsibility for another is precisely a saying prior to anything said. The
saying which is a responsibility for another is against “the winds and tides” of
being, is an interruption of essence, a disinterestedness imposed with a good
violence. [44] The saying is both an affirmation and a retraction of the said. The
said, contesting the abdication of the saying that everywhere occurs in this said,
maintains the diachrony in which, holding his breath, the spirit hears the echo of
the otherwise. [45] It is only in the order of being that rectification, truth and
error have meaning. To enter into being and truth is to enter into the said; being
is inseparable form its meaning! It is spoken. It is logos. But the reduction is
reduction of the said to the saying beyond the logos, beyond the being and non-
being, beyond essence, beyond true and non-true. It is the reduction to
signification, to the one-for-the-other involved in responsibility… the utopia, of
the human. It will be said to show that there is question of the said and being
only because saying or responsibility require justice.
4. SAYING AND SUBJECTIVITY
a. Saying without the Said
[46] Saying states and thematizes the said, but signifies it to the other, a
neighbor; with a signification that has to be distinguished from that borne by
words in the said. In the correlation of saying and the said the said is understood
as a noema of an intentional act. The saying and the said in their correlation
delineate the subject-object structure. [47] The saying, in the form of
responsibility for another, is bound to an irrecuperable, unrepresentable, past
temporalizing according to a time with separate epochs, in a dichotomy. The act
of saying which turn out to have been introduced here from the start as the
supreme passivity of exposure to another, which is responsibility for the free
initiatives of the other.
b. Saying as Exposure to Another
[48] The relationship with the other would then extend forth as intentionality,
out of a subject posited in itself and for itself, disposed to play, sheltered for all
ills and measuring by thought the being disclosed as the field of this play.
Saying is communication, to be sure, but as a condition for all communication,
as exposure… to traumas, vulnerability. [49] … to open to the point of
separating itself form its own inwardness…; it must be disinterested. This being
torn up from oneself in the core of one’s unity, this absolute noncoinciding, this
diachrony of the instant, signifies in the form of one-penetrated-by-the-other.
[50] Saying is denuding, of the unqualifiable one, the pure someone, unique and
chosen. The reverting of the ago into a self, the de-posing or desituating of the
ego, is the very modality of dis-interedness. It has a form of a corporal life
devoted to expression and to giving. It is devoted and does not devote itself: it is
a self despite itself, in incarnation, where it is the very possibility of offering,
suffering and trauma.
c. Despite Onself
[51] The thematization of time, as it shows itself in the said, is indeed
recuperated by an active ego which recalls… anticipates… and… synchronizing
the signs, assembles into a presence, that is, represents, even the time of
responsibility for the other. That responsibility for the another… exceeds every
actual or represented present. It is thus in a time without beginning. [52] The
identity of the same in the ego comes to it despite itself from the outside, as an
election or an inspiration, in the form of the uniqueness of someone assigned.
The subject is for another; its own being turns into for another, its being dies
away turning into signification. Being for death is patience, non-anticipation, a
duration despite oneself, a form of obedience. Here the temporality of time is an
obedience. The subject as a one discernible from the other, as an entity, is a pure
abstraction if it is separated from this assignation.
d. Patience, Corporeality, Sensibility
[53] The subject then can’t be described on the basis of intentionality,
representational activity, objectification, freedom and will; it has to be described
on the basis of the passivity of time. One has to go back to that hither side,
starting from the trace retained by the said, in which everything shows itself.
The movement back to the saying is the phenomenological reduction. In it the
describable is described. [54] An exposure to the other, it is signification, is
signification itself, the-one-for-the-other to the point of substitution, but a
substitution in separation, that is, responsibility. [55] The most passive,
unassumable, passivity, the subjectivity of the very subjection of the subject, is
due to my being obsessed with responsibility for the oppressed who is other than
myself. In the form of corporeality, whose movements are fatigue and whose
duration is ageing, the passivity of signification, of the one-for-another is not an
act, but patience.
e. The One
[56] The I is said by him that speaks. Here uniqueness means the impossibility
of slipping away and being replaced, in which the very recurrence of the I is
effected. If the passivity is not reducible to the passivity of an effect in a causal
relation, it can be conceived to be on [57] the hither side of freedom and non-
freedom, it must have the meaning of a “goodness despite itself”, a goodness
always older than the choice. Goodness is always older than choice. Uniqueness
is without identity. Not an identity, it is beyond consciousness, which is in itself
and for itself. For it is already a substitution for the other.
f. Subjectivity and Humanity
Concepts are ordered and unfold in truth (whose presuppositions, like
conventions, make the combinations of concepts like a game), according to the
logical possibilities of thought and the dialectical structures of being. [59] But
we do not need this knowledge in the relationship in which the other is a
neighbor, and in which before being individuation of the genus man, a rational
animal, a free will, or any essence whatever, he is persecuted one for whom I’m
responsible to the point of being a hostage for him, and in which my
responsibility, instead of disclosing me in my “essence” as a transcendental ego,
divests me without stop of all that can be common to me and another man, who
would thus be capable of replacing me. Subjectivity imposed as an absolute… is
sacred in its alterity with respect to which, in an unexceptionable responsibility,
I posit myself deposed of my sovereignty. Paradoxically, it is qua alienus -
foreigner and other – that man is not alienated.
Chapter III. SENSIBILITY AND PROXIMITY
1. SENSIBILITY AND COGNITION
[61] The subjective movement of cognition belongs to being’s very essence, to
its temporalization in which essence takes on sense, in which the image is
already an idea, a symbol of another image, both theme and openness, pattern
and transparency. This subjective movement belongs to the very indifference of
a noema to a noesis and to a thinker that is absorbed and forgotten in it. [62] Of
itself the openness upon being is imagination and symbolism. As discovery and
knowing, sensible intuition is already of the order of the said; it is an ideality.
An idea is not a simple sublimation of the sensible. [63] Cognition is the
operation in which the idea which a word substitutes for the image of an entity
“enlarges the horizon” of the appearing, and reabsorbs the shadow whose
opacity the consistency of the given projects on to the transparency of intuition.
Even when unformed, or deformed, by knowing, sensible intuition can revert to
its own meaning. But sensation, which is at the basis of sensible experience and
intuition, is not reducible to the clarity or the idea derived out of it. The
dominant meaning of sensibility should indeed enable us to account for its
secondary signification as a sensation, the element of a cognition. [64] In
knowing, which is in itself symbolic, is realized the passing from the image, a
limitation and a particularity, to the totality. Consequently, being’s essence is
moved into the whole content of abstraction. To say that in sensibility this
structure is secondary, and that sensibility qua vulnerability nonetheless
signifies, is to recognize a sense somewhere else than in ontology. By contrast
with this vulnerability, knowing, being’s disclosure to itself, marks a break with
the immediate, and in certain sense an abstraction.
2. SENSIBILITY AND SIGNIFICATION
[65] Philosophy… tries, in the course of its phenomenology, to reduce the
manifest and the manifestation to their preoriginal signification, a signification
that does not signify manifestation. This preoriginal signification includes the
motifs of origin and appearing. Hussrel: through the notion of non-theoretical
intentionality, of signification other than those of appearing, and of the
subjectivity as a source of significations affirms a fundamental analogy between
the cognitive consciousness of… and axiological or practical intentions. [66] a
signifyingness, conceived in the philosophical tradition of the West as a
modality of its manifestation… Since being’s essence makes truth possible, by
this very essence, the subject (whatever be the name one gives it) is inseparable
from [67] knowing and the showing effected by intentional. The-one-for-another
has the form of sensibility or vulnerability, pure passivity or susceptibility,
passive to the point of becoming an inspiration, alterity in the same, the trope of
the body animated by the soul, psyche… Here psyche is the maternal body.
Signification is sensibility. [68] … the very sense of the psyche which in the
Western tradition is in play between being and its manifestation, or in the
correlation of being with its manifestation. The notion of access to being,
representation, and thematization of a said presuppose sensibility, and thus
proximity, vulnerability and signifyingness.
3. SENSIBILITY AND PSYCHE
[69] In the form of responsibility, the psyche in the soul is the other for me, a
malady of identity, both accused and self, the same for the other, the same by the
other. In a system signification is due to the definition of terms by one another in
the synchrony of a totality, where the whole is the finality of the elements.
[70] ... the very rationality of signification in which the tautological identity, the
ego, receives the other, and takes on the meaning of an irreplaceable identity by
giving to the other… Signification is the-one-for-the-other which characterizes
an identity that does not coincide with itself. This is in fact all the gravity of an
animated body, that is, one offered to another, expressed or opened up! The
psyche or animation is the way a relationship between uneven terms, without
any common time, arrives at relationship. [71] Animation can be understood as
an exposure to the other, the passivity of for-the-other in vulnerability, which
refers to maternity, which sensibility signifies. The modification of sensibility
into intentionality is motivated by the very signification of sensing as a for-the-
other. To knowledge as symbolic aim corresponds being showing itself
symbolically, significatively, in Husserl’s sense, on the basis of an other than
itself, and to intuition being in its image as a presence (perception) or as an
absence (imagination and memory). Then the whole of the psyche can be
interpreted as knowing. When not reduced, sensibility is the duality of the
sensing and the [72] sensed, a separation, and at once a union, in time, a putting
of the instant out of phase, and already a retention of the separated phase. As
reduced, sensibility is animated, a signification of the one for the other, a duality
not assemblable of the soul and the body, the body being inverted into a for-the-
other by animation, a diachrony other than that of representation. Enjoyment is
an ineluctable moment of sensibility.
4. ENJOYMENT
[73] Matter… “materializes” in the satisfaction, which fills an emptiness before
putting itself into a form and presenting itself to the knowing of this materiality
and the possession of it on the form of goods. Satisfaction satisfies itself with
satisfaction. Life enjoys its very life. Enjoyment is an enjoying of enjoyment,
always wanting with regard to itself. [74] Enjoyment and the singularization of
sensibility in an ego take from the supreme passivity of sensibility, from its
vulnerability, its exposedness to the other, the anonymousless of the
meaningless passivity of the inert. The sensibility has meaning only as a…
giving.
5. VULNERABILITY AND CONTACT
[75] Sensibility is exposedness to the other… precisely what all protection and
all absence of protection already presuppose: vulnerability itself. At the height
of its gnoseological adventure everything in sensibility means intuition,
theoretical receptivity from a distance. But as soon as it falls back into contact, it
reverts from grasping to being grasp. [76] In the proximity of contact arises
every committed freedom, which is termed finite by contrast with the freedom
of choice in which consciousness is the essential modality. Yet the effort is
made to reduce all commitment to freedom. The doxic thesis, dormant in
contact, is thematized and comes to the surface of an object in a knowing… and
[embedding] in the system of signification that figure in the said. Sensibility…
is not constituted out of some apperception putting consciousness into
relationship with a body. The sensible experience of the body is already and
from the start incarnate. [77] The corporeality of one’s own body signifies, as
sensibility itself… but it has also to contain a passage to the psychochemical-
physiological meaning of the body. And this letter does devolve from sensitivity
as proximity, as signification, as one-for-the-other, which signifies in giving.
Signification is thus conceived on the basis of the-one-for-the-other proper to
sensibility and not on the basis of a… simultaneity [which] in fact is only the
situation of the speaker. The other calls upon that sensibility with… an
irrevocable responsibility, and thus the very identity of a subject. Signification is
witness or [78] martyrdom. Here the subject is origin, initiative, freedom,
present. To move oneself or to have self-consciousness is in effect to refer
oneself to oneself, to be an origin. Subjectivity of flesh and blood in matter – the
signifyingness of sensibility, the one-for-the-the-other itself - is the preoriginal
signifyingness that gives sense, because it gives. Because the diachrony of
sensibility, which cannot be assembled in a representational present, refers to an
irrecuperable pre-ontological past. [79] The animation of a body by a soul only
articulates the-one-for-the-other in subjectivity. The intelligibility of incarnation:
the “I think” separated from extension, the cogito separated from the body.
Identity takes form not by self-confirmation, but, as a signification of the-one-
for-the-other, by a deposing of oneself, a deposing which is the incarnation of
the subject, or the very possibility of giving, of dealing signifyingness. An
insurmountable ambiguity: the incarnate ego. [80] This ambiguity is the
condition of vulnerability itself, of sensibility as signification. It is in the
signification of the-one-for-the-other that systems, consciousness, thematization
and statement of the true and of being are comprised. Husserl’s intentionalities;
Heidegger’s ontic… everywhere yielding before the ontological. An entity
counts only on the basis of knowing, of appearing, of phenomenology.
6. PROXIMITY
a. Proximity and Space
[81] “Humanity”: [presupposes] absolute and proper meaning [of proximity].
The impassiveness of space refers to the absolute coexistence, to the conjunction
of all the points, being together at all points without any privilege. [82]
Proximity is not a state, a repose, but, a restlessness, null site, outside of the
place of rest. Proximity, “as the “closer and closer”, becomes the subject.
Proximity is the subject that approaches and consequently constitutes a
relationship in which I participate as a term, but where I am more, or less, than a
term.
b. Proximity and Subjectivity
[83] Consciousness, which is consciousness of a possible, power, freedom,
would then have already lost proximity properly so called, now surveyed and
thematized, as it would have already repressed in itself a subjectivity older than
knowing or power. United in the same, assembles into experience, like an effect
of any synthesis of multiplicity, proximity has already falsified its extraordinary
ambiguity of being a whole broken by the difference between terms, in which
difference is non-indifference and the break is an obsession. Consciousness is
perhaps the very locus of the reverting of the facticity of individuation into a
concept of an individual, and thus into consciousness of its death, in which its
singularity is lost in its universality. [84] But the obsession by the neighbor is
stronger than negativity. The subject affected by the other cannot think that the
affection reciprocal, for he is still obsessed with the very obsession he could
exercise over him that obsesses him. In this non-reciprocity… is announced…
the immediacy of the other… the immediacy of proximity. In the responsibility
which we have for one another, I have always one response more to give, I have
to answer for his very responsibility. [85] The proximity of me with the other
is… a transcendence. The proper signification of subjectivity is proximity, but
proximity is the very signifyingness of signification, the very establishing of the-
one-for-the-other, the establishing of the sense which every thematized
signification reflects in being. [86] Subjectivity is not antecendent to proximity,
in which it would later commit itself. On the contrary, it is proximity, which is a
relationship and a term, that every commitment is made.
c. Proximity and Obsession
Proximity is not a fusion, it is contact with the other. [87] The neighbor assigns
me before I designate him. This is a modality not of a knowing, but of an
obsession. Knowing is always convertible into creation and annihilation. [88]
The modality of obsession is known but not a knowing. The neighbor who could
not leave me indifferent, the undesirable desired one, has not revealed to desire
the ways of access to him. In every experience the making of the fact precedes
the present of experience. In proximity is heard a command come as though
from an immemorial past, which was never present, began in no freedom. This
way of the neighbor is a face. The face of a neighbor signifies for me an
unexceptionable responsibility, preceding every free consent, every pact, every
contract. [89] Proximity, suppression of the distance that consciousness of…
involves, opens the distance of a diachrony without a common present, where
difference is the past that can’t be caught up with, and unimaginable future, the
non-representable status of the neighbor behind which I am late and obsessed by
the neighbor. This difference is my non-indifference to the other. The obligation
aroused by the proximity of the neighbor is not to the measure of the images he
gives me; it concerns me before or otherwise. Such is the sense of the non-
phenomenality of the face.
d. Phenomenon and Face
[90] The exorbitance of proximity is distinguished from a conjunction in
cognition and intentionality in which subject and object enter. Proximity,
immediacy, is to enjoy and to suffer by the other. But I can enjoy and suffer by
the other only because I am-for-the-other, I am signification. [91] A face is a
trace of itself, given over to my responsibility, but to which I am wanting and
faulty. The empty space of what could not be collected there is the trace of a
passage which never became a present, and which is possibly nothingness. But
the surplus over pure nothingness, an infinitesimal difference, is in my non-
indifference to the neighbor, where I am obedient as though to an order
addressed to me. [92] To revert to oneself is not to establish oneself at home,
even if stripped of all one’s acquisitions. It is to be like a stranger, hunted down
even in one’s home, contested in one’s own identity and one’ very poverty,
which like a skin still enclosing the self, would set it up in an inwardness,
already settles on itself, already a substance. It is always to empty oneself anew
of oneself, to absolve oneself. It is to be an undeclinable One, speaking, that is,
exposing one’s very exposedness.
e. Proximity and Infinity
[93] A trace lost in a trace, less than nothing in the trace of a necessive, but
always ambiguous (trace of itself, possibly a mask, in a void, possibly
nothingness or “pure form of the sensibility”), the face of the neighbor obsesses
me with this destitution. The more I answer, the more I am responsible; the more
I approach the neighbor with which I am encharged the further away I am. [94]
A face as a trace, trace of itself, trace expelled in a trace, does not signify an
indeterminate phenomenon: its ambiguity is not an indetermination of a noema,
but an invitation to the risk of approach qua approach, to the exposure of one to
the other, to the exposure of this exposedness, the expression of exposure,
saying.
f. Signification and Existence
To state the problem of existence of God, despite the-one-for-the-other, which
derogates for the finality of the interestedness of man inhabiting the world, is to
hold to the unity of being and the univocity of its esse, which, despite the
multiplicity of its modalities, would be verified in efficacity, in action and in the
resistance to action, would “enter into account”, figure in the calculation that
accompanies projects. [95] Signification structured as the-one-for-the-other is
here set forth independently of ontological finality and of mathematical
functionalism, which, in the main tradition of Western philosophy, supply the
norms of intelligibility and of sense. To have a sense is to be a means toward an
end, and thus to be inseparable from a will through which the end is an end. [96]
… intentionality bears the trace of the voluntary and the teleological.
Signification is signifying out of lack [97] The trace of a past in a face is not the
absence of a yet non-revealed, but the anarchy of what has never been present,
of an infinite which commands in the face of the other and which, like an
excluded middle, could not be aimed at.
Chapter IV. SUBSTITUTION
1. PRINCIPLE AND ANARCHY
[99] Subjectivity qua consciousness can be interpreted as the articulation of an
ontological event, as one of the mysterious ways in which its “act of being” is
deployed. Being a theme, being intelligible or open, possessing oneself, the
moment of having in being – all that is articulated in the moment of essence,
losing and finding itself out of an ideal principle. [100] … to describe
subjectivity as irreducible to consciousness and thematization… Signification is
the contradictory trope of the-one-for-the-other. The-one-for-the-other is not a
lack of intuition, but the surplus of responsibility. My responsibility for the other
is the for of a relationship, the very signifyingness of signification… an
assignation of me by another, a responsibility with regard to men we do not even
know. [101] We have called this relationship irreducible to consciousness
obsession. The relationship with exteriority is “prior” to the act that would effect
it. Obsession traverses consciousness countercurrent wise, is inscribed in
consciousness as something foreign, a disequilibrium, a delirium… movement,
in the original sense of the term, an-archical. Disorder is but another order, and
what is diffuse is thematizable. Anarchy… brings into lost the ontological play
which, precisely qua play, is consciousness, where being is lost and found again,
and thus illuminated. [102] This play in being is consciousness itself: presence
to self through a distance, which is both loss of self and recovery in truth. Hegel:
the I is but consciousness mastering itself in self-equality. Consciousness is
wholly equality (equality of self with self, but also equality in that for
consciousness responsibility is always strictly measured by freedom, and is thus
always limited). In these traits we recognize a persecution: being called into
question prior to questioning, responsibility over and beyond the logos of
response.
2. RECURRENCE
[103] Nothing here resembles self-consciousness. It has meaning only as an
upsurge in me of a responsibility prior to commitment. Consciousness fulfills
the being of entities. The identity of the I would thus be reducible to the turning
back of essence upon itself. [104] The oneself does not bear its identity as
entities, identical in that they are said without being unsaid, and thus are
thematized and appear to consciousness. The oneself takes refuge or is exiled in
its own fullness, to the point of explosion or fusion, in view of its own
reconstitution in the form of an identity identified in the said. The oneself cannot
form itself; it is already formed with absolute passivity. [105] The recurrence of
the oneself refers to the hither side of the present in which every identity in the
said is constituted. It is already constituted when the act of constitution first
originates. The oneself has not issued from its own initiative… on the way to the
unity with an Idea. In that idea, coinciding with itself, free inasmuch as it is a
totality which leaves nothing outside, and thus, fully responsible, the oneself
posits itself as an always convertible term in relation, a self-consciousness. [106]
The oneself proper to consciousness is then not again a consciousness, but a
term in hypostasis. It is by this hypostasis that the person, as an identity
unjustifiable by itself and in this sense empirical or contingent, emerges
substantively. [107] The negative qualifications of the subjectivity of the
oneself… confirm the presynthetic, prelogical and in a certain sense atomic, that
is, in-dividual, unity of the self, which prevents it from splitting, separating itself
from itself as to contemplate or express itself, and thus show itself. [108]
Recurrence is but an “outgoing” of unity. As a unity in its form and in its
content, the oneself is a singularity, prior to the distinction between the
particular and the universal. [109] The expression “in one skin” is not a
metaphor for the in-itself. This contraction is not an impossibility to forget
oneself, to detach oneself from oneself, in the concern for oneself. It is a
recurrence to oneself out of an irrecusable exigency of the other, a duty
overflowing my being , still quite relative, in the inertia and materiality of things
at rest. Responsibility prior to any free commitment, the oneself outside of all
tropes of essence, would be responsibility for the freedom of the others.
3. THE SELF
[110] Western philosophy… remains faithful to the order of things and does not
know the absolute passivity, beneath the level of activity and passivity, which is
contributed by the idea of creation. …an absolute accusative in which the ego
proper to free consciousness is caught up. The subject is in accusative, without
recourse in being, expelled from being, outside of being… without a foundation,
reduced to itself, and thus without a foundation. … would invert into a
recurrence in which the expulsion of the self outside of itself is its [111]
substitution for the other? Is not that the self emptying itself of itself would
really mean? This recurrence would be the ultimate secret of the incarnation of
the subject; prior to all reflection, prior to every positing, an indebtedness before
any loan, nor assumed, anarchical, subjectivity of a bottomless passivity, made
out of assignation, like the echo of a sound that would precede the resonance of
its sound. The recurrence of persecution in the oneself is thus irreducible to
intentionality in which, even in its neutrality as a contemplative movement, the
will is affirmed. Subjectivity taken as intentionality is founded on auto-affection
as an auto-revelation, source of an impersonal discourse. [112] It is in passivity
of obsession, or incarnated passivity, that an identity individuates itself as
unique, without recourse to any system of references, in the impossibility of
evading the assignation of the other without blame. The more I return to myself,
the more I divest myself, under the traumatic effect of persecution, of my
freedom as a constituted, willful, imperialist subject, the more I discover myself
to be responsible; the more just I am, the more guilty I am. I am ‘in myself”
through the others. … the anachronism of a debt preceding the loan
4. SUBSTITUTION
[113] In creation, what is called to being answers to a call that could not have
reached it since, brought out of nothingness, it obeyed before hearing the order.
[114] The recurrence to oneself cannot stop at oneself, but goes to the hither side
of oneself. The passivity undergone in proximity by the force of an alterity in
me is the passivity of a recurrence to oneself which is not the alienation of an
identity betrayed. What can it be but a substitution of me for the others? It is,
however, not alienation, because the other in the same is my substitution for the
other through responsibility, for which I am summoned as someone
irreplaceable. I exist through the other and for the other, but without this being
alienation: I am inspired. This inspiration is the psyche. [115] Through
substitution for the others, the oneself escapes relations. At the limit of passivity,
the oneself escapes passivity or the inevitable limitation that the terms within
relation undergo. In the incomparable relationship of responsibility, the other no
longer limits the same, it is supported by what it limits. Here the
overdetermination of the ontological categories is visible, which transforms
them into ethical terms. [116] To be in-oneself, backed up against oneself, to the
extent of substituting oneself for all that pushes one into this null-place, is for I
to be in itself, lying in its beyond essence. It is the setting up of a being that is
not for itself, but is for all, is both being and disinterestness. The for itself
signifies self-consciousness; the for all, responsibility for the others, support of
the universe. The face of the other in proximity, which is more than
representation, is an inrepresentable trace, the way of the infinite. [117] To be
oneself, otherwise than being, to be dis-interested, is to bear the wretchedness
and bankruptcy of the other, and even the responsibility that the other can have
for me. Beyond egoism and altruism it is the religiosity of the self. [118] “I am
an other”… is not the alienation… I am outside of any place, in myself, on the
hither side of the autonomy of auto-affection and identity resting on itself. The
self is goodness, or under the exigency for an abandon of all having, of all one’s
own and all for oneself, to the point of substitution.
5. COMMUNICATION
[119] … the radical reversal, from cognition to solidarity, that communication
represents with respect to inward dialogue, to cognition of oneself, taken as the
trope of spirituality. Those who wish to found on dialogue and on an original we
the upsurge of egos, refer to an original communication behind the de facto
communication (but without giving this original communication any sense other
than the empirical sense of a dialogue or a manifestation of one to the [120]
other – which is to presuppose that we that is to be founded), and reduce the
problem of communication to its certainty. Regarding communication and
transcendence one can indeed only speak of their uncertainty.
6. “FINITE FREEDOM”
[122] The subjectivity of a subject comes late into a world which has not issued
from his projects does not consist in projecting, or in treating this world as one’s
project. To be responsible over and beyond one’s freedom is certainly not to
remain a pure result of the world. This antecedence of responsibility to freedom
would signify the Goodness of the Good: the necessity that the Good chose me
first before I can be in a position to choose, that is, welcome its choice. That is
my pre-ordinary susceptiveness. It is passivity prior to all receptivity, it is
transcendent. The Good is before being. [123] … the uniqueness of the
responsible egos is possible only in being obsessed by another, in the trauma
suffered before any auto-identification, in an unrepresentable before. In this
trauma the Good reabsorbs, or redeems, the violence of nonfreedom.
Responsibility is what first enables one to catch sight of and conceive of value.
[124] Finite freedom is not simply an infinite freedom operating in a limited
field. The will which it animates wills in a passivity it does not assume. In the
irreplaceable subject, unique and chosen as a responsibility and a substitution, a
mode of freedom, ontologically impossible, breaks the unrendable essence.
Substitution frees the subject… from the enchainment to itself, where ego
suffocates in itself due to the tautological way of identity. [125] in subjectivity
the by-the-other is also the for-the-other. In suffering by the fault of the other
dawns suffering for the fault of others, supporting. The for-the-other keeps all
the patience of undergoing imposed by the other. There is substitution for
another, expiation for another. Freedom is compromised in this balance of
accounts in an order where responsibilities corresponds exactly to liberties
taken, where they compensate for them. The self, the subjection of subjectivity
of the subject, is the very over-emphasis of a responsibility for creation. [126]
… it is in me – in me and not in another, in me and not in an individuation of the
concept ego – that communication opens. No one can substitute himself for me,
who substitutes myself for all. The concept of the ego can correspond to me only
inasmuch as it can signify responsibility, which summons me as irreplaceable.
[127] In substitution my being that belongs to me and not to another is undone,
and it is through this substitution that I am not “another”, but me. I am unique
and chosen; the election is in subjection. We have to conceive… the de-
substantiation of the subject, its de-reification, its disinterestedness, its
subjection, its subjectivity. It is a pure self, in the accusative, responsible before
there is freedom. [128] the other is the end; I am… a responsibility and a
substitution supporting the world in the passivity of assignation.
My responsibility for all can and has to manifest itself also in limiting itself. The
ego can, in the name of this unlimited responsibility, be called upon to concern
itself with itself.
Chapter V. SUBJECTIVITY AND IDENTITY
1. SIGNIFCATION AND THE OBJECTIVE RELATION
a. The Subject Absorbed by Being
[131] The implication of the subject in signification… is equivalent neither to
the shifting of signification over to the objective side… nor to its reduction to
what is called a subjective lived experience. …the appearing of being belongs to
its very moment of being, that its phenomenology is essential, and that being
can’t do without consciousness, to which manifestation is made. [132] Being’s
esse, through which an entity is an entity, is a matter of thought, gives
something to thought… a kind of indigence in being, constrained to an other
than itself, to a subject called upon to welcome the manifestation. …every game
that consciousness would play for its own account would be but a veiling or an
obscuring of being’s essence, a lie or ideology
b. The Subject at the Service of the System
The intelligibility of systematic structure of the totality would allow the totality
to appear and would protect it against any alteration that could come to it from
the look. A structure is precisely an intelligibility, a rationality or a signification
whose terms by themselves do not have signification. [133] But the clarity
comes from a certain arrangement which orders the entities or the moments and
the esse ipsum of these entities into a system, assembling them. An isolated
element or an isolated structure cannot be exhibited without being obscured by
its nonsignifyingness. [134] The thinking subject, called up to search for this
intelligible arrangement, is then, despite the activity of its searching, despite its
spontaneity, to be interpreted as a detour that being’s essence takes to get
arranged and thus to truly appear, to appear in truth. The role that is incumbent
on the subject in the manifestation of being makes the subject part of the way
being carries on. Then, as a participant in the event of being, the subject also
manifests itself.
c. The Subject as a speaking that is Absorbed in the Said
The subject would not be the source of any signification independently of the
truth of the essence which it serves. [135] Subjectivity, the ego and the others
would be the signifiers and signified in which the subjective representation of
being is realized. Being would have a signification, that is, would manifest itself
as already invoked in silent and nonhuman language, by the voices of silence.
d. The Responsible Subject that is not Absorbed in Being
In responsibility the same, the ego, is me, summoned, provoked, as
irreplaceable, and thus accused as unique in the supreme passivity of one that
cannot slip away without fault. [136] To understand that A could be B,
nothingness has to be a sort of being. Matrix of every thematizable relation, the-
one-for-the-other, signification, sense or intelligibility, does not rest in being. It
guides discourse beyond being.
e. The-One-for-the-Other is not a Commitment
[137] It is a question of a signification in which the meaning of establishment
and representation are indeed justified, but this signification signifies prior to
any world, signifies the proximity of the same and the other, in which the
implication of the one in the other signifies the assignation of the one by the
other. [138] The plot of goodness and the Good, outside of consciousness,
outside of essence, is the exceptional plot of substitution, which the said in its
dissimulated truths betrays, and conveys, before us. To be oneself as in the trace
of one’s exile is to be as a pure withdrawal from oneself, and as such, an
inwardness.
It is not commitment that describes signification; it is signification, the-one-for-
the-other characteristic of proximity, which justifies all commitment.
[139] Proximity, difference which is non-indifference, is responsibility. It is a
response without a question, the immediacy of peace that is incumbent on me. It
is the signification of signs. It is the passivity of exposure, a passivity itself
exposed. [140] The latent birth of the subject occurs in an obligation where no
commitment was made. The subject is born in the beginninglessness of an
anarchy and in the endlessness of obligation. Subjectivity is described as a
substituting for the other, as disinterestness, or a break with essence.
2. THE GLORY OF THE INFINITE
a. Inspiration
[141] My passivity, passivity as the one-for-the-other transcends essence
understood as potency and as act. It is as such that my passivity is signification.
Responsibility for the other signifies not the disclosure of a given and its
reception, but the exposure of me to the other, prior to every decision. The
psyche signifies the claiming of the same by the other, or inspiration, beyond the
logic of the same and the other, of their insurmountable adversity. [142] The
psyche is not an ego, but me under assignation. There is an assignation to an
identity for the response of responsibility. Approached in responsibility for the
other man, the psyche in the subject, the one-for-the-other, would be
signification or intelligibility, or signifyingness itself.
b. Inspiration and Witness
[143] It is to exhaust oneself in exposing oneself, to make signs by making
oneself a sign, without resting in one’s figure as a sign. A sign given to the other
and already a sign of this giving of signs, pure signification, proximity is not a
confusion with another, which would be a way of resting in an avatar, but
incessant signification, a restlessness for the other. This responsibility is… the
impossibility of being silent, the scandal of sincerity. Sincerity would then be
saying without the said, apparently a “speaking so as to say nothing”, a sign I
make to another of this giving of signs.
c. Sincerity and the Glory of the Infinite
[144] Does not the sense of sincerity refer to the glory of infinity, which calls for
sincerity as for a saying? [145] the glory of identity, is the inequality between
the same and the other, the difference that is also the non-indifference of the
same for the other and the substitution which, in its turn, is a nonequality with
oneself, a non-recovering of self by self, a dispossession of self, the self leaving
the clandestinety of its identification. It is already a sign made to another, assign
of this giving of signs, that is, of this non-indifference, a sign of this
impossibility of slipping away and being replaced, of this identity, this
uniqueness: here I am.
d. Witness and Language
Subjectivity is from the first substitution offered in place of another, but before
the distinction between freedom and nonfreedom. It is the null-place in which
inspiration by the other is also expiation for the other, the psyche by which
consciousness itself would come to signify. [146] The subjectivity of the
subject, as being subject to everything, is a pre-originary susceptibility, before
all freedom and outside of every present… in the “here I am” which is
obedience to the glory of the Infinite that orders me to the other. The Infinite
does not appear to him that bears witness to it. On the contrary the witness
belongs to the glory of the Infinite. It is by the voice of the witness that the glory
of the Infinite is glorified. [147] The saying in the said of the witness born
signifies in a plot other than that which is spread out in a theme, other than that
which attaches a noesis to a noema, a cause to an effect, the memorable past to
the present. [148] The Infinite has glory only through subjectivity, in the human
adventure of the approach, of the other, through the substitution for the other, by
the expiation for the other.
e. Witness and Prophecy
[149] We call prophecy this reverting in which the perception of an order
coincides with the signification of this order given to him that obeys it. Prophecy
would thus be the very psyche in the soul: the other in the same, and all of man’s
spirituality would be prophetic. As a sign given to the other of this very
signification, the “here I am” signifies me in the name of God, at the service of
men that look at me, without having to identify myself with, but the sound of my
voice or the figure of my gesture – the saying itself. Witness is humility and
admission; it is made before all theology; it is kerygma and prayer, glorification
and recognition. [150] That the glory of the Infinite is glorified only by the
signification of the-one-for-the-other, as sincerity, that is my sincerity the
Infinite passes the finite, that the Infinite comes to pass there, is what makes the
plot of ethics primary, and what makes language irreducible to an act among
acts. Before putting itself at the service of life as an exchange of information
through a linguistic system, saying is witness; it is saying without the said, a
sign given to the other. [151] The glory of the Infinite shuts itself in a word and
becomes a being. But it already undoes its dwelling and unsays itself without
vanishing into nothingness. It invests being in the very copula with which it
receives attributes. Infinity is beyond the scope of the unity of transcendental
apperception, cannot be assembled into a present, and refuses being recollected.
This negation of the present and of representation finds its positive form in
proximity, responsibility and substitution. In proximity, in signification, in my
giving of signs, already the Infinite speaks through the witness I bear of it, in my
sincerity, in my saying without said, preoriginary saying which is said in the
mouth of the very one that receives the witness.
3. FROM SAYING TO THE SAID, OR THE WISDOM OF DESIRE
[153] Through the obsession with the other, accusing, persecuting, the
uniqueness of oneself is also the defection of the identity that identifies itself in
the same. The defection of identity… is the inversion of being into a sign, the
subversion of essence that begins to signify before being, the disinterestedness
of essence. [154] The enigma of God speaking in man and of man not counting
on any god? By this contestation [of the Infinite] everything is incumbent on me,
and there is produced my entry into the designs of the Infinite. The
transcendence of the Infinite is an irreversible divergence from the present, like
that of a past that was never present. [155] What shows itself thematically in the
synchrony of the said in fact lets itself be unsaid as a difference of that cannot be
assembled, signifying as the-one-for-the-other, from me to the other. The very
exhibition of the difference goes diachronically from the said to the unsaid.
[156] The statement of the beyond being, of the name of God, does not allow
itself to be walled up in the conditions of its enunciation. The Infinity does not
enter into a theme like a being to be given in it, and thus belie its beyond being.
Here there is an inversion of order; the revelation is made by him that receives
it, by the inspired subject whose inspiration, alterity in the same, is the
subjectivity or psyche of the subject. [157] Why would proximity, the pure
signification of saying, the anarchic one-for-the-other of beyond being, revert to
being or fall into being, into a conjunction of entities, into essence showing itself
in the said? The responsibility for the other is an immediacy antecedent to
questions, it is proximity. It is troubled and becomes a problem when a third
party enters. [The third party] is of itself the limit of responsibility and the birth
of the question: What do I have to do with justice? A question of consciousness.
Justice is necessary, that is, comparison, coexistence, contemporaneousness,
assembling, order, thematization, the visibility of faces, and thus intentionality
and the intellect, and in the intentionality and the intellect, the intelligibility of a
system, and thence also a copresence on an equal footings as before a court of
justice. [158] The neighbor that obsesses me is already a face, both comparable
and incomparable, a unique face and in relationship with faces, which are visible
in the concern for justice. It is only thanks to God that, as a subject
incomparable with the other, I am approached as an other by the others, that is,
“for myself”. [159] The forgetting of self moves justice. [160] Responsibility for
others or communication is the very rationality of reason or its universality, a
rationality of peace. Consciousness is born as the presence of a third party.
Order, appearing, phenomenality, being are produced in signification, in
proximity, starting with the third party. The apparition of a third party is the very
origin of appearing, that is, the very origin of an origin. The foundation of
consciousness is justice. But justice can be established if I, always evaded from
the concept of the ego, always desituated and divested of being, always in non-
reciprocatable relationship with the other, always for the other, can [161]
become an other like the others. My lot is important.
It is through its ambivalence which always remains an enigma that infinity or
the transcendent does not let itself be assembled. [162] There is an ambiguity of
the order that orders to me the neighbor who obsesses me, for whom and before
whom I answer by my ego, in which being is inverted into a substitution, into
the very possibility of gift – and of infinite illeity, …the subversion of essence
into substitution.
4. SENSE AND THE THERE IS
Being qua being is a function of justice. [163] Everything shows itself in a
justice. Being’s essence, and consciousness before being and after having been,
signify. It is justice signed by signification, by the one-for-the-other that requires
phenomenality, that is, the equivalence of simultaneity between consciousness
acceding to being and being open to consciousness. It is inasmuch as the
signification of the-one-for-the-other is thematized and assembled, and through
the simultaneity of essence, that the one is posited as an ego, that is, as a present
or as a beginning or as free, as a subject facing an object. But it is also posited as
belonging to essence, which when assembled cannot leave anything outside, has
no outside, cannot be worn away. It is in his ex-ception and ex-pulsion as a
responsible one that a subject outside of being can be conceived. In
signification, in the-one-for-the-other, the self is [164] a being provisionally
transcendental and awaiting a place in the being it constitutes. The one in the-
one-for-the-other is not a being outside of being, but signification, evacuation of
Being’s essence for the other. The self is a substitution for the other, subjectivity
as a subjection to everything, as a supporting everything and supporting the
whole. The there is is all the weights that alterity weights supported by a
subjectivity that does not found it. But one must not say that the there is results
from a “subjective impression”. To support without compensation, the excessive
or disheartening hubbub and encumberment of the there is is needed.
Signification is the ethical deliverance of the self through substitution for the
other. It is consumed as an expiation for the other. The self before any initiative,
before any beginning, signifies anarchically, before any present.
5. SKEPTICISM AND REASON
[165] Reason is sought in the relationship between terms, between the one and
the other showing themselves in a theme. This coexistence or accord between
different terms in the unity of a theme is called a system. The one-for-the-other
constitutes signification or intelligibility. Reason, in which the different terms
are present, that is, are contemporaneous in a system, is also the fact that they
are present to consciousness inasmuch as consciousness is representation,
beginning, freedom. [166] The difference in proximity between the one and the
other, between me and a neighbor, turns into non-indifference, precisely into my
responsibility, Non-indifference, humanity, the-one-for-the other is the very
signifyingness of signification, the intelligibility of the intelligible, and thus
reason. It is a reason before the beginning, before any present, for my
responsibility for the other commands me before any decision, any deliberation.
Reason is the one-for-the-other. If the preoriginal reason of difference, of non-
indifference, responsibility, a fine risk, conserves its signification, the couple
skepticism and refutation of skepticism has to make its appearance alongside of
the reason in representation, knowing, and deduction, served by logic and
synchronizing the successive. [168] For Western philosophy the saying is
exhausted with the things said. But skepticism in fact makes the difference, and
outs an interval between saying and the said. [169] The history of Western
philosophy has not been the refutation of skepticism as much as the refutation of
transcendence. The logos said has the last word dominating all meaning, the
word of the end, the very possibility of the ultimate and the result. [170] Are the
renderings of the logical text mended by logic alone? It is through the State that
reason and knowledge are force and efficacity. The said interrupted dialogue of
the dialogue delayed by silences, failure or delirium, but the intervals are not
recuperated. [171] The self is non-indifference to the others, a sign given to the
others. Every discourse, even when said inwardly, is in proximity and does not
include the totality. The permanent return of skepticism does not so much
signify the possible breakup of structures as the fact that that they are not the
ultimate framework of meaning… It reminds us of the, in any broad sense,
political character of all logical rationalism, the alliance of logic with politics. It
recalls the breakup of the unity of the transcendental apperception, without
which one could not otherwise than be.
Chapter VI. OUTSIDE
[177] The concept being… is, according Hegel, not distinguishable from pure
nothingness. But already the intellectual power to strip of all content, the
boldness of the abstraction and the universalization are sanctioned by this
nothingness which undermines being, the decomposition that exhausts being’s
esse, the finitude of essence. The concepts emanates from essence. Science
which is science of the universal, play of essence playing at being and at
nothingness, would never be born. Essence, cognition and action are bound.
[178] We would not here venture to recall the beyond essence if this history of
the West did not bear, in its margins, the trace of events carrying another
signification, and if the victims of the triumphs which entitle the eras of history
could be separated from its meaning. [179] Essence carries on as presence,
exhibition, phenomenality or appearing, and as such requires a subject in the
form of consciousness, and invests it as devoted to representation. This way of
requiring the subject and committing it to representation by appearing, in which
essence effectuates its presence, is the objectivity of essence. One can’t conceive
essence otherwise, one can conceive otherwise only the beyond essence. But is
the sense of space… that does not involve other significations? [180] … the
enlargement of the closure which the abstract notions of freedom and
nonfreedom do not exist. My exposure to another in my responsibility for him
takes place without a decision on my part… It is exposure to the openness of a
face, which is the “further still” of the undergoing of the closure of the oneself,
the opening up which is not being-in-the-world. [182] To transcend oneself, to
leave one’s home to the point of leaving oneself, is to substitute oneself for
another. The openness of space as an openness of self without a world, without a
place, utopia, the not being walled in, inspiration to the end, even to expiration,
is proximity of the other which is possible only as responsibility for the other, as
substitution for him. The alterity of the other is not a particular case, a species of
alterity, but its original exception… it is because newness comes from the other
that there is newess transcendence and signification. It is through the other that
newess signifies in being the otherwise than being. [184] Man called forth by a
manifestation, is found again. Here the human is brought out by transcendence,
out by the hyperbole, that is, the disinterestedness of essence, a hyperbole in
which it breaks up and falls upward, into the human.